The variety of lentils available in India has the potential to make our everyday food much more nutritious and bring a wider flavour profile to our plate, writes Sangeeta khanna
If you have lived in a metro city all your life, you are most likely to have missed some of the best choices in food. The glut of imported vegetables and fruits in urban markets make for a good eyewash and most of us are aware of this already. The day the urban markets start stocking wild purslane and wild fiddle head fern in season, we would know our choices have improved. We don’t realise how much we can control the food system and the market just by making the right choices and being aware in the first place. We end up consuming a very narrow range of produce even though there is a vast variety available and remains undervalued. For example, India is the leading manufacturer of lentils and we still need to import lentils from other countries because most of us consume only two to three types of lentils as staples and a large variety of lentils remain undervalued.
Just think of the lentils you can recognise by taste and if all you can come up with is kali dal and peeli dal and may be sambar, you need to educate yourself better. The amazing variety of lentils available in India has a potential to make our everyday food much more nutritious and bring a wider flavour profile to our plate.
In fact, the awareness about the variety of real foods and ingredients available around us can be instrumental in bringing a desired change in our own health management and the environment of the planet. The regional variety of foods within the country is mind boggling and when I see people lugging gluten free flours from the west, I wonder when and how would we market our millets better. Recently, when I moved to Dehradun, I was most excited about the local seasonal vegetables, lentils and beans I now have access to. But when I heard a Maharashtrian neighbour lamenting about the unavailability of motth lentils in the town and another Keralite neighbour complain about how difficult it was to bring ragi flour from her native place, I figured it was time to introduce them to local produce as replacements. I took them to the kirana shop across the road and introduced them to the naurangi dal and mandue ka atta. In the bargain, I made friends with the kirana shop owner, who got me local hemp seeds. This kind of personal connect with ingredients wouldn’t have been possible at the supermarket a couple of kilometres away. Ah, we surely need to realign our food compass a little bit to see clearly.
I am reminded of a story my grandmother used to tell me when I was little. It is a story of a little birdie who used to go searching for lentil grits in the chakki of each home and how she once tried to pick a lentil and half of the split lentil got stuck in the chakki. The birdie lamented about how she didn’t get enough food for her pardes (foreign) travel. It was possibly a migratory bird who needed all the food for the long distance travel and the hand operated stone-mill in the homes was the best place to pick on them. Several folk tales and ancient sayings had lentils as a central theme in India. This just goes to say that lentils have been an important part of our food system.
Interestingly, the hand-operated stone mill has been instrumental in the ways lentils have been used in India, the largest producer and consumer of lentils on earth. In fact, the black lentil or urad dal and black chickpeas or black gram are native to India and have been used in various ways since the time recorded. Mung beans have been known to have originated from black lentils, hence the genus of both remains the same, that is vigna mungo. Various other lentils came to India through spice routes and other trade routes and have become naturalised ever since. The most interesting occurrence of the readiness with which Indians adapted each lentil to suit the palate and gut both, as some of these lentils were not tasty, most of them not easily digestible, some had a very hard seed coat and some were hard to crack.
The hand-operated chakki came handy to process the lentils in the most usable form. The traditional domestic chakki used to have small wooden pegs to adjust to the size of grain or lentil being milled and if the lentils needed to be split or ground into flour to make besan or sattu. In many small town homes till about four decades ago, the besan or sattu used to be made fresh whenever needed, much like we use the mixie or coffee grinder today.
There were byproducts of the stone grinding process and those were never wasted. While the husk or bran went to cattle feed, the grits were used to make different types of steamed dumplings or deep fried pakodas or the sun dried badis that were flavour bombs to be added to curries. While women of the house had to handle all this milling, sorting, winnowing, badi making and sun drying and then cooking as well, they found ways to entertain and bond over these chores.
In fact stone grinders and cooking techniques from different regions of the country give a fair idea of how the kitchen gadgets and ways of cooking have evolved with the kind of produce in a specific geographic region. For instance, in the mountain state of Uttarakhand, the variety of lentils and beans is quite huge but most of them are hard to grind and take hours to cook. In the mountains, high altitude also plays a role in cooking time. The harder the lentils, the more difficult they are to digest. This is also the reason the most popular lentil recipes of Uttarakhand are well adjusted to their hardness, cooking time and digestibility.
Lentil recipes like Phanu, Chainsu, Dubka and Ras are elaborate Uttarakhand recipes where the lentils are first roasted and then cooked whole or after grinding them in a stone grinder. These dishes are slow cooked in iron utensils for long hours to make them most nutritious and warming for the locals, where they don’t get a lot of produce to cook with. In the mountains, where the lentils and beans are rain fed crops along with some coarse varieties of rice and millets, lentils become the mainstay of nutrition for everyone. Even the seasonal or foraged vegetables are greens are preserved in the form of sun dried lentil cakes or badis.
The stone grinders in the southern states are more adapted for the ways the lentils are processed before cooking. To make the lentils digestible and suited for the warm climate, they are soaked and ground into a wet paste before fermenting them in most cases. The stone grinders for wet grinding are in fact a genius design that allows efficient use of manual force to make smooth paste of soaked lentils and even grains and spices etc. For splitting the lentils, there were the chakki type stone grinders in southern India in the olden times and that explains the evolution of some of the lentil vadas that are made with coarsely ground mixed lentils, initially made with the grits that was a byproduct of splitting the lentils. Even the watery rasam and chunky sambar, cooked with a lot of vegetables and tamarind, are examples of lentil recipes adapted to suit local ingredients and warmer climate of the south.
Rajasthan and Gujarat use the maximum amount of lentils for the variety of snacks and main course dishes they cook with lentils, majorly the black gram. The recipes from these regions are often rich with fats and spices but very well adjusted to the climate, cooking methods and digestibility.
In modern times, in the last 4 decades to be specific, the electric mixer grinders have revolutionised the way we cook and the per capita consumption of lentils has increased manifold. Of course, the production has also increased, but the ease of grinding the lentils has made it much easier for the home cook. That is one of the reasons why every North Indian family makes idli and dosa at home now and making the dal vada at home is as easy as the pyaz ke pakode. Even the South Indian stone grinders have transformed to electrically operated sleek machines and making traditional foods using lentils and grains has become easier for everyone.
My book on pakodas, the quintessential snack made mostly with lentils has recipes using many different lentils and even grains, tubers and even fruits. Many of these pakoda family snacks are shallow fried and even steamed and that indicates that the traditional recipes have evolved with human nutrition being the central point even if the taste buds ruled to decide the flavours. The book on pakodas celebrates the diversity in Indian food with some recipes with wild and foraged greens and even some medicinal pakoda recipes that were part of the everyday food repertoire in every household earlier.
The writer is an author; a food and nutrition consultant; and develops recipes and products for the industry. Her book Pakodas: The Snack for all Seasons came out in August this year
